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Selling Your Wireless Traffic to Passers-By
An anonymous reader submitted a bit about a company called Joltage who wants to
make it so that home and business users can make a few bucks by
selling
their excess bandwidth to people who just happen to be in the neighborhood.
Besides the obvious security issues, and the serious lack of coverage once you
get out of metropolitan areas, this could be seriously cool.
Most broadband providers (cable, dsl...) have license agreements forbidding the reselling of bandwidth to people other than in the household for which the line was subscribed. Therefore, this would be illegal.
here leaning out their windows screaming at passers-by that they need Orinoco cards 'cause they'll get 500 yard rage....:)
...there is no such thing is there?
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Despite the catchy slogan, sometimes obscurity can provide a small measure of security. The first step in securing wireless networks should be making the transmissions uninterceptable by hackers. Therefore I would like to invoke the concept of "guided wavefronts". What you do is you provide a contained medium that is impervious to casual break-ins within which the signal can propagate.
The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter. Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this issue.
I haven't seen anything like this concept on the market but it seems like a good idea. How come nobody is working on it?
Sounds a lot like what the guys at Sputnik are doing.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
What happens when someone starts looking up kiddie porn on your connection? Are you liable?
Hacker Media
IANAL, but there are definite TOS issues. Do you think Ameritech, AT&T, charter, etc... are conna let you even THINK about this?
and I quoteth from ameritech, my dsl provider:
"7. CUSTOMER SUPPORT
Basic ADSL Internet Access, as applicable, is a single IP Service intended for use by a single user. You shall not use the Service in a manner that is inconsistent with this intended use. SBCIS will not provide support for the installation or ongoing management of a customer premise router with your Basic DSL Internet service. Primary and Secondary Domain Name Service is not provided as part of the Basic DSL Internet Access Service. "
joltage shoulda checked the bandwidth proveder contracts first. even if they don't cover it now, they have the right to change it whenever they want.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
More pie-in-the-sky head-in-the-clouds naievete from Slashdot.
I'm going to write an article about free bandwidth and get a front page post on slashdot.
For the umpteenth time :
New term coinage: War Spamming!
Just what I want - to host a random spammer on my home LAN, and be the tracepoint of whatever this person wants to send out on the net. Seriously, if this "guest" wants to send stuff to deaththreats@whitehouse.gov, I'd be the target of an anal investigation by the NSA and the USSS at the very least.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
1 - why would anyone in their right mind pay $24
per month for something they can have for free
with the most minimal effort (there are enough
access points out there that nobody should
ever want for bandwidth, let alone pay for it)
2 - Global IP addresses. After authing with their
little propriatrary shim, I'm not connected
behind joe shmo's NATing LinkSys crap access
point. Oh, gee... I thought I was going to
get a global IP address for my $24 per month.
fsck this, I'm going to buy some *real*
bandwidth.
I'm not sure of what exactly are the differences between the two. Sputnik seems to have more information on their pages about the architecture, but they could be very similar, from what I'm reading.
If they are similar, this is one industry that's already in need of a shakeout. I imagine the real value of something like this being in availability and different systems don't help that much.
Serious problem... Joltage wants to encourage people by paying them to extend their network. Many of the benefits, none of the work... nice idea.
The problem is that most end-user DSL (and all consumer cablemodem that I've seen!) Acceptable Use Policies explicitly prohibit reselling the service!
I'm signed up with a Washington State DSL ISP that has been incredible --
- They got me installed when Verizon said I wasn't in a servicable area
- I have their SO/HO level of service
- I can run servers
- I can host my own domain (two, actually!)
- I can NAT and firewall to my heart's content
- I don't have to deal with PPPoE (straight bridge config)
- I get 5 IPs...
But even with all this freedom, I am still not allowed to re-sell access. I run an 802.11a access point, and it's NAT'd off on its' own -- anyone can connect... but I am contractually prohibited from profiting from it.(Can you tell I like this company?)
Personally, I don't think Blarg would have kittens over this. They're not "like that." Object, yes... charge me more, yes. Call in the National Guard... no. However, I can see other ISPs (Comcast comes to mind, with their NAT inquisition) that will scream that this is the end of the world.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Virtually no ISP in the land will allow you to sell your excess bandwidth. Many will shut you down if they even suspect that you may be using a NAT device to connect multiple machines.
For 1 simple reason: Terms of Service (TOS) Agreements.
If someone picks up my wireless service and uses it for any length of time, there is nothing anyone can do about it.
The user would need to, at the very least, be FORCED to sign (or at least click) a TOS agreement before using the service.
I can see Johnny Cochran now:
If he did not click, you must acquit!
-D
'People react to it [using WiFi] the way they did to the first time they used the Internet, or heard 'Smells like Teen Spirit,'" said Cliff Skolnick, an engineer...'
here
These are odd examples of previous successes for an advocacy piece.
YMMV, but for me:
first time used the Internet - confused as hell,
first time heard 'Teen Spirit' - I felt ill.
http://milkshake.dexy.org
The security issues of allowing random anonymous people access to an internet connection that is in your name are quite overwhelming. Consider the wide range of things that could be done that would bring the full force of the law down upon you. From fraud to illegal images to death threats against well-known individuals. The police would not accept as a defense that you allow people who you don't know access to your network. You will surely be arrested, which means you will probably lose your job - depending on your employer and of course whether you are released on bail. You might get off on a trial, especially if the search of your home and your computers turns up no evidence against you. If you're lucky, you will get your eqipment back in a timely fashion after your acquital. This is if you get acquited - the details of the case, how much the police/FBI want to get you, and whether they find anything else suspicious on your machines will decide this. You don't have to be charged with anything they find for it to be used as evidence against you - something as simple as an archive of every Phrack - or even a single issue - would weigh heavily against you.
Until this issue is worked out, it does not make sense to make a wireless internet-connected network publicly accessible if you are just an individual.
I have my apartment # in my SSID on my wireless AP so people "Netstumbling" can come and chat with me. No takers yet. Yes I am using WEP so that actually have to come see me if they want access.
------
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Just about every single broadband ISP has it in their license agreement that you will not run servers or otherwise saturate your connection to them. If this ever starts taking off, expect to immediately see one of three things: either the ISP's initiate a per month bandwidth limit that is very low, the ISP's start enforcing some form of MAC address verification, or they charge a per-megabyte bandwidth fee (in addition to the $40+ you pay already just for the "privilage" of being hooked up to their network).
This idea is ludicrous, and is doomed to fail right from the start. What are these people smoking?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
I am setting up an 802.11b wireless network in my girlfriend's apartment. When I come over, I can bring out my laptop and access her cable modem connection. We are located on the top floor of a 3-story apartment building at the corner and I bet if I position the antenna right, I can cover 200 other houses and apartments. I would be happy to get a 768kbs DSL line as a backup and sell the service. That is until the cable companies get wise and shut down the NAT on the boxes.
For lower prices on my "excess" bandwidth I can prostitute my connection. Just let me know where to sign fellas!
I don't think people feel like paying... I just noticed this morning, that somebody near by is trying to get dhcp addies from my internal dmz firewall... also seems that their is another ap that has been assoiated with my ap. Welp, once I hunt down this person who broke my wep key, I guess its time to be extra paranoid again.
BTW, its not Illegal to resell your cable/home dsl bandwidth, its just in violation of the contract.
The "Sign up as a provider" page has this option:
;)
"Do you want to be a wireless User as well? (A credit card is required.)"
Cool! I can pay my ISP and then pay these people to use the bandwidth that I'm selling to them!
I'm disgusted by this overwhelming sense of entitlement displayed by many in the Slashdot readership in the comments sections. Some of you believe that just because you pay a (very reasonable, flat-rate) fee for network access, email and news, you have a license to use all your bandwidth, all the time in any manner that you please. It's just plain bad manners, and I'm sure that it wouldn't have been tolerated in the internet days of yore when bandwidth and system resources were hard to come by.
Hint: the reason that @Home and its descendents won't let you use IPSec or run servers on their network is that it's their network! Either pay more for better service (like a T1) or rip off some other provider's bandwidth.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
I just did a search of the entire US on their site and didn't find ANY.
There are 5 in NY, three (including the "Joltage Headquarters") are OFF. So Joltage won't even provide its own service to people?
I found ONE in LA and ONE in Chicago. Both are off.
None in Atlanta, GA, Washington, DC, St. Louis, MO, Charlotte, NC.
They really need to improve their search feature. How do I know if I want to sign up if I can't get an acurate picture of coverage?
Yeah, let me pay you 25 USD/month for NOTHING. RIGHT.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
The Queen Mother has died. :-(
She apparently died peacefully, in her sleep.
I can resell my bandwidth!
It's a business T1. I can do whatever I want with it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
...because you can get it for free, with exponetially more coverage than this scheme offers.
Crank up Netstumbler (http://www.netstumbler.com) on your laptop, and drive around. You'll be amazed at how many open networks you find; at least 2/3rds don't even use WEP encryption. The Linksys wireless AP is now less than $200: they're everywhere (and most are running on the default config, and offer a DHCP IP address with no questions asked).
In other top stories, researchers have revealed that war causes injury and Slashdot is a haven of zealots...
Open 802.11 + open relay = spam spam spam, with *NO* return address.
Yay!
All the difficulties and problems aside ...
...)
Wireless would be really cool in this situation, but not everyone has that option in their laptops. What we all do have is a 56k modem. If there was a system that allowed subscribers to dial in to businesses and be forwarded to a modem bank and routed out through their Internet connection, I think they'd have something. It would have to be 'user proof' and streamlined. If all the user had to do was dial a 1800 number, and that got them connected to a local number with 56k access, I think it would have a chance. Everything would have to be transparent to the user though.
Buying a bunch of modems would be so much more expensive than a simple wireless setup though (from what I can tell
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The best option if this is a service people would actually desire, is to convince the majority of neighborhoods to wire themselves up with high speed ethernet, making each subdivision one high speed local area network, then feed a few T1 lines into the area for upstream (add more as needed) and split the costs over the entire neighborhood. Then have wireless access points scattered throughout. then simply exchange services with other neighborhoods. They're allowed to access yours if you're allowed to access theirs, and you could cover an entire city this way with wireless and it costs nobody anything extra, so long as the user has their home wired SOMEWHERE.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
What if someone sends SPAM through your access point?
I can see it now. College students that are in business entrepreneur somehow making or getting their hands on several access points and setting up shop with those things all over the place for passerby's and even when they have long left still collecting commission because the access point is well hidden or scattered. Or any other setting that has loads of bandwidth for free.
You could be a decent human being and just share your bandwidth. Remember sharing? Oh yeah, newt gingrich and friends outlawed that, didn't they?
This may have been posted already, but...
1) I envision providers figuring out the "Joltage" protocol and generating "fake" sales, just to get more money from the company. (Similar to the initial craze of advertising websites that tried to "pay" you for leaving their banner ads open on your desktop... people hacked it and initally got more money.. until the company's business model imploded.)
2) What's the "Joltage" policy when it comes to customer abuse of the network?
SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE A_WINNER = "YUO";
So then reselling bandwidth is a breach of contract, at which point the ISP cuts your access off.
Not only that, but if the contract included a software rental license, it might say something to the effect: "Any material breach of this contract by the Subscriber terminates the Client Software License, and any further use of the Client Software constitutes copyright infringement" to the tune of a fine up to $100,000 in the U.S. (The software backup law 17 USC 117 does not apply to rentals.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sure, I could set up a server to host many domains.
What I was referring to, though, was Blarg's "Primary or Secondary DNS for two domains" service that comes with my account. (I'm using Verizon's 768/128 line rate -- that's the fastest I can get at my distance.)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
it doesn't mean that violation of the terms of the contract opens you to criminal liability.
Oh yes it can, if the contract includes a copyright license. See also my other comment in this thread.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is sexcellent!
Absolutely.
I didn't figure I really had to go into details, but I will now.
- My wireless access point doesn't get much use. I've noticed exactly ONE other person use it in the nearly 6 months it has been available. Their traffic was IM (ICQ) and HTTP, mainly hitting MSN and Hotmail. It lasted about 2 weeks, then disappeared. I figure it was someone visiting in a nearby apartment.
- I don't advertise its' availability, and I have no intentions of installing a high-gain antenna. If you stumble upon it, fine -- it's 802.11a (54 Mbit, Intel mfg.), which a lot of people don't have equipment for. If you do have equipment (and it manages to be compatible -- 802.11a is known for not playing 'nice'), you'll get a DHCP offer in the 10.n.n.n range. Have a ball; I'm altruistic like that.
- I do watch its' usage -- both destination addresses and traffic types. If it spikes, I'll just install traffic-shaping on the firewall.
In short, I like my ISP. I get the usage I want from them, and I'm not going to do anything to drive them out of business. I know the realities, I'm not going to try and bend the laws of "business physics.""...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
The idea of grassroots bandwidth by-the-people
and for-the-people is certainly democratic and
appealing in a 60s kind of way. But, commenters
are correct in that there are contractual issues
with underprovisioned and over-lawyerd ISPs,
and this vision of wireless utopia is a pipedream.
That said, I and other professionals who travel
would pay for predictable and reliable service
in airports and hotels. I sincerely hope that
Sputnik or Instant802 or Joltage or someone else
who have done the system integration plus the
authentication and proper billing systems win
a contract with one of the major ISPs, probably
a cellular provider, to build out and operate
this kind of service.
Paying for access to phantom bandwidth will not
attract a self-sustaining customer base. Free
access to phantom bandwidth is not a self-sustaining business model. Fix the biz
and and things could get started. It's not the
same as universal bandwidth everywhere, even
though that is a very worthwhile goal. But that
goal cannot be reached in one step. A self-sustaining business is the necessary first
step.
Not with my ISP, I can use as much bandwidth as I use, I can run a company on it. Share it with as many as I want. :) :)
Might be because nobody expects you to run a serious company from a xDSL line.
However if this neat concept caught on, I would expect to see a announcement of a change in the policy of the product.
I saw a few comments at threshold 4 saying this would be against the Acceptable Use Policy of a lot of providers, and that it would be better to get dedicated bandwidth (a T1) to do this.
Well, how about it? How much is a T1 these days? Could this pay for itself, or even compete with DSL?
I'm used to seeing full T1s sell for around $1k a month. I would have to recover around $1000 to be breaking even. I'm in downtown Seattle, so I think if this idea took off I'd have a rich pool of potential drive-by customers, but I'd also have a lot of coffee house and bar customers. There are about a dozen bars and coffee houses within 2000 feet of my apartment.
The Joltage site is a little sketchy about financial details, but their hourly rate is $2. They also say that the "hot spot" (me in this case) gets half of the revenue. That means I'd have to accumulate 1000 hours a month combined to recoup the $1000 a month I'd be paying for my T1. If 20 users consistantly used my net for 2.5 hours per business day (of which there are aprox 20 in a month), it would work. Is this realistic?
Right now I don't think it is. All the customers who might be interested already have solutions in place. The only way this could take off would be if they signed up people who already have bandwidth they can give away and who won't suffer if noone uses them. There are a few internet caffes around here who might be interested since they already have net AND they already re-sell it to their existing customers. The overhead would be a little lower for them and it could attract more customers. This project looks tenuous at best.
I wish them luck.
I find it overly optimistic that on their location search page they list 226 countries/locations, yet only 2 or 3 of them even have connection points. Like what's the use of listing Afghanistan in there - on the rare chance that someone might put up a hot spot there... 1) Who would dare to use it? 2) It has a 50/50 chance of getting blown up within the hour. Not sure where they're going with this one.
How exactly is breaking contract law anything but illegal?
See, this is how contract law works: I make you an offer which entails an exchange of goods - say you get personal access to my bandwidth and I get your money. You accept that offer, including a condition that it is only for your household's use. A contract is formed.
You have no more right to use anything but our agreed bandwidth than I have to bill your credit card with anything but our agreed sum.
If I suddenly decided to double-bill your credit card, you'd be screaming about how illegal my behaviour is, and you'd be right. Well, guess what, sonny - it works both ways.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Anyone else notice that the tab for this window when abbreviated looks like (if you're not reading carefully) it says "Selling Your Wife"? :)
You're a suburbanite.
I keep my WAP open and very public. Number one because it's cool, and number two because it keeps me on my toes security wise.
At best I get 2-3 people connecting in a given day. Even if the location was heavily advertised, I doubt I'd see more then 10.
The money I'd make through this would'nt be worth the time and energy to collect income, the system resources on my machine to keep proper accounting, or the loss of helping to build free wireless networks.
I keep my WAP open so folks at the the bar down the street can get online. I wish everyone had that attidude.
The Internet is generally stupid
I work for a local commercial ISP, and among other things I signed away on my NDA, I can't sell internet service. I'd imagine that's the case with a lot of employers' NDAs and/or other employment agreements.
* If you're somebody the police would like to entrap, *then* they might go engaging in suspicious activities on your wireless network as an excuse to get a warrant, but most people in that situation know enough to be worried....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"Drive-by-spamming" has been the common term for this - because it is an obvious risk.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's all used up by War-Drivers.
How can you expect to sell something that anyone with a Pringles tube can steal for free?
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
Many ISP's (comcast) despise wireless access points, and in fact *block* access to their network if you have certain access points hooked into your connection (mac filtering I'm assuming).
Do you have a reference for this claim - a URL or something? I've had WiFi (linksys router right now, other stand alone APs) sitting directly behind my Comcast cable modem for some time now and never heard of this before. Oh and I can change the MAC address of the thing to whatever I like.
You cant resell bandwidth. They might be a bit more lenient if you give it away and just ask for donations.
To solve the problem with people spaming from your network you need a lot of logs and a DHCP server. Simply have people sign up providing their name, phone number, email and mac address. Set the DHCP server and NAT to check its a mac address on the list and log the outgoing TCP connections with the source mac address. Now they can still spam, but you can prove it was them!
As for security, just remind people to install a personal firewall.
If you need money use the always-on connection. Add a webserver for people willing to donate to the network. Since your not technicly selling bandwidth you might get away with it.
The finishing touch would be a really big webcache. That kind of thing is important when you have a lot of people trying to share one connection. Cable and adsl might look fast in the advertisments where they boast about it being 512k but remember they are assymetric.
I am not a lawyer, so don't rely on this as legal advice.
Generally, my experience with DSL providers has been that they do not prohibit this kind of sharing. Indeed Covad's sales staff touts this kind of unrestrictedness as selling point. (I called Covad's sales line to confirm this a while ago.)
This is not so surprising when you consider that the places where wireless service is expected to be most useful are "hot spots" where people gather and sit down, such as resturaunts, coffee shops, retailers, and various waiting areas, typically places that are likely not to order broadband otherwise.
It is difficult to prove a negative. So, maybe those who believe their acceptable use policy prohibits this should provide relevant excerpts. It would be interesting to see if those AUP's also, with the same stretch of interpretation, prohibit attaching a wireless access point, using Network Address Translation to connect more than one computer, or using the connection for work.
By the way, my impression is that DSL people seem to be more positively disposed toward this sort of thing than the cable modem providers.
Disclaimer and plug: I am involved in LANRoamer, a GPL'ed wireless roaming network that allows people to get paid for providing wireless service. The back end is also GPL-compatible open source.